"Our
goal is a Christian Nation.... We have a Biblical duty, we
are called by God to conquer this country. We don't want
equal time. We don't want Pluralism. We want theocracy.
Theocracy means God rules. I've got a hot flash. God rules."
-- Randall Terry, Head of Operation Rescue,
speaking in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on April 15, 1993, as
reported the following day in The
News-Sentinel.

Randall Terry claims he
has mellowed, as most of us do with age. But, along with
many of his fellow evangelicals, he remains aggressively
committed to his goal of turning America into "a Christian
nation."

Appearing almost nightly last month on Fox News,
CNN, and MSNBC as the spokesman for the parents of the
brain-damaged Terri Schiavo, the charismatic militant urged
Florida’s Governor Jeb Bush to violate a court order and
reinsert the feeding tube that had kept the poor woman in
what her husband and doctors called "a persistent vegetative
state" for nearly 15 years.

"If Gov. Bush wants to be the
man that his brother is, he needs to step up to the plate
like President Bush did when the United Nations told him not
to go into Iraq," Randall Terry proclaimed. "Be a man. Put
politics aside."

If the Brothers Bush and other
Republican politicians did not do as he said, the 46
year-old Terry threatened political retribution:

I promise you, if she dies, there's
going to be hell to pay with pro-life, pro-family,
Republican people of various legislative levels, both
statewide and federally, who have used pro-life, pro-family,
conservative rhetoric to get into power, and then when they
have the power, they refuse to use
it.

Feeling the heat from his
right-wing base, President Bush publicly urged the courts to
show "a presumption in favor of life." Pope John Paul II had
proclaimed a "culture of life" years before, and the
president took every opportunity to repeat the phrase.

"It should be our goal as a nation," he declared, "to
build a culture of life, where all Americans are valued,
welcomed, and protected - and that culture of life must
extend to individuals with disabilities."

Who could
disagree? But what strange "culture of life" enables Mr.
Bush to preach compassion as he pursues war? What "culture
of life" embraces Randall Terry, who calls Mrs. Schiavo’s
husband Michael "a monster" and openly preaches hatred,
violence, and death?

A used car salesman and failed rock
star, Terry created Operation Rescue in 1987, organizing
violent blockades at abortion clinics around the country and
openly applauding vandalism, arson, and the murder of
doctors and clinic workers.

One of Terry’s closest
co-workers - James Kopp - shot and killed Dr. Barnett A.
Slepian, 52, a Buffalo obstetrician and gynecologist who
performed abortions. Another of Terry’s cohorts - Pastor
Matt Trewhella, founder of Missionaries to the Preborn -
openly called for the formation of armed militias.

Terry
himself spent five months in prison for sending one of his
people to show a fetus to presidential candidate Bill
Clinton in 1992, violating a federal court order. "If a
Christian voted for Clinton, he sinned against God," said
Terry. "It's that simple."

More mouth than muscle, Terry
generally restricted himself to justifying the killing of
"abortion doctors" and promising their legal execution.

"When I, or people like me, are running the country,
you'd better flee," he warned, "because we will find you, we
will try you, and we will execute you. I mean every word of
it. I will make it part of my mission to see to it that they
are tried and executed."

Talking here to an August 1995
banquet of Howard Phillip’s Taxpayers Alliance, Terry
announced a new leadership institute that would provide
"three days of intense training on vision, courage, biblical
ethics, raising up a cadre of people who are militant, who
are fierce, who are unmerciful to the deeds of darkness,
unmerciful to the ideologies of hell."

"If we're going to
have true reformation in America," he declared, "it is
because men once again, if I may use a worn out expression,
have righteous testosterone flowing through their veins.
They are not afraid of contempt for their contemporaries.
They are not even here to get along. They are here to take
over."

With Terry’s view in
mind, the Tax Payers Alliance has now become the
Constitution Party, which promises "to restore our
government to its Constitutional limits and our law to its
Biblical foundation." Roy Moore, the "Ten Commandments
Judge," is one of the party favorites, and has spoken at
their events.

The party also continues to work closely
with "the Patriot Movement" and its right-wing militias,
including a number of groups that are virulently
anti-Semitic, deny the Holocaust, and speak longingly of Der
Fuhrer.

Far more troubling, Randall Terry’s vision seems
to have also taken over much of the Republican Party, many
of whose leading figures now openly pursue the same
Christian Nationalism, deny the separation of church and
state, and attack "unelected" federal and state judges.

"Mrs. Schiavo's death is a moral poverty and a legal
tragedy," proclaimed the GOP’s Tom DeLay, Majority Leader of
the US House of Representatives.

"This loss happened
because our legal system did not protect the people who need
protection most, and that will change. The time will come
for the men responsible for this to answer for their
behavior, but not today."

Republican Senator John Cornyn,
of Texas, went even further, appearing to justify violent
attacks against judges.

"We seem to have run through a
spate of courthouse violence recently that's been on the
news," he said, "and I wonder whether there may be some
connection between the perception in some quarters on some
occasions where judges are making political decisions yet
are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and
builds up and builds up to the point where some people
engage in - engage in violence."

And now Bill Frist, the
Senate Majority Leader and a leading contender for the GOP
presidential bid in 2008, has joined with right-wing
evangelicals in a TV extravaganza to portray the Democratic
defense of traditional Senate filibuster rules as a radical
attack on "People of Faith."

"For years activist courts,
aided by liberal interest groups like the ACLU, have been
quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like
thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage
and our religious freedoms," declared Tony Perkins, the
chief lobbyist for one of the sponsoring groups, the Family
Research Council.

"We must stop this unprecedented
filibuster of people of faith."

When so many Republican
leaders and their evangelical allies sound so much like
Randall Terry, we can only wonder whether the Grand Old
Party will ever again find the voice of reason.

*******ENDS*******

A
veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New
Left monthly Ramparts, Steve
Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a
magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and
works in France, where he writes for t r u t h o u
t.

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